Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – [Who guards the guardians?]
~ Juvenal
In 1857, the pseudo-constitutionalism of the Dred Scott v. Sandford majority led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney essentially decreed that all people of African descent, whether or not they were slaves when brought into the United States and held as slaves under the same racist logic that barnyard animals (chattel) were not protected by the Constitution, could never become U.S. citizens.
Dred Scott was not an anomaly. It was the opening salvo in an existential, protracted war against the U.S. Constitution started in 1803 by Chief Justice John Marshall in the case Marbury v. Madison where the court alone using judicial review, not Congress, not the president, not We the People, to decree themselves the final arbiter on what the law is versus what the law ought to be.
In 1857, Justice Taney began a diabolical brand of liberal activist jurisprudence that arrogantly ignored the Constitution, natural law, original intent and the doctrine stare decisis (judicial precedent), while self-importantly substituting liberal Democratic Party politics and later evolution, Social Darwinism, eugenics and Nietzsche’s radical ideas, as well as viewing Christianity as “slave morality,” in place of the verity of the Constitution.
The liberal activism of Dred Scott would later spawn the contraception and abortion cases like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973).
For over 100 years, Progressive presidents (Democrats and Republicans) purposely appointed like-minded, anti-natural law jurists to the Supreme Court, continuing the Progressive Revolution of Woodrow Wilson (Federal Reserve, deconstruction of states’ rights via the 17th Amendment), FDR (“New Deal”), LBJ (“Great Society”) and our current Progressive president, Barack Obama (“Obamacare”).
Despite Dred Scott’s diabolical legacy, which was affirmed in the infamous 1896 case Plessey v. Ferguson, all was not lost. The good news here was that there was a counterrevolution lead by conservative members of the high court called “The Lochner Era” – beginning with Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897) and ending 40 years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937).
The Four Horsemen – Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland and Willis Van Devanter – was the nickname given by the progressive press to the four conservative members of the United States Supreme Court during the 1932–1937 terms. These courageous jurists consistently opposed the New Deal agenda of President Roosevelt by following a neo-natural law jurisprudence based on the substantive due process protection of contractual and property rights.
The Four Horsemen often convinced one or more fellow justices (Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes and/or Owen Roberts) to form a majority to defeat FDR’s radical attempts to bring private property regulation under federal control and consistently struck down many New Deal programs as unconstitutional violations of the Separation of Powers doctrine or the Interstate Commerce Clause. They were opposed by the liberal/progressive wing of the court, called the “Three Musketeers” – Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Harlan Stone.
During the 1935 term, the court initially had accepted some of the New Deal legislation over the objections of the four conservative justices who ruled against the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935). Likewise, the Four Horsemen, along with Roberts and Hughes, in United States v. Butler (1936), struck down FDR’s major New Deal policy initiatives, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the Federal Farm Bankruptcy Act, the Railroad Act, and the Coal Mining Act. In Carter v. Carter Coal Company (1936), the Four together with Roberts voided legislation regulating the coal industry and voided a New York minimum-wage law for women and children in Morehead v. New York (1936).
The Four Horsemen often would ride together in a car to and from the Supreme Court to coordinate positions and arguments. FDR and his willing accomplices – progressives, socialists, unions and the press – expressed a venal hatred of the Four’s obstructionism since they all heralded FDR’s New Deal policies as a new Progressive Age of Utopia. Likewise, the consensus of the academy believed that the court’s dislike of “regulated capitalism” confronted the country with “the question not how governmental functions shall be shared, but whether in substance we shall govern at all.”
The year 1937 saw FDR’s “The switch in time that saved nine” court-packing threat together with the case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which upheld the constitutionality of FDR’s progressive minimum-wage legislation and thus put the death knell to natural law jurisprudence by overturning an earlier Lochner-era decision, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). Finally, 1937 witnessed the retirement of Justice Willis Van Devanter, the first of the Four Horsemen to leave the court, together with his replacement by Hugo Black in June 1937. Thus ended the Four Horsemen’s domination of the high court.
Fast forward 75 years to today. Now we have the same issues, but different players on stage – the Four Horsemen in 2012 are Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Our FDR is President Barack Obama, who arrogantly promised a resurrection of FDR’s welfare-state policies he referred to as “New Deal, Part 2.” Yet, the war against America goes beyond FDR to the 1870s as Marxists, Darwinists, liberals, socialists, progressives and the academy have systematically used Machiavelli’s “the ends justify the means” philosophy to deconstruct the U.S. Constitution by co-opting the three branches of government to force a progressive, systematic Fabian Socialism down the throats of the American people.
As the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Obamacare next Tuesday, it is the height of treason, willful ignorance and voluntary slavery that nearly 315 million Americans will be held hostage by a unanimous (9), majority (5) or swing member (1) like a Justice Anthony Kennedy to decree as constitutional President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and his individual mandate tax. In other words, Justice Kennedy will have the unconstitutional fascist power to hammer the final nail in America’s coffin of communism.
The question of ultimate concern here is: Will Justice Kennedy do it?
